Annie Smith was born and grew up on the east coast. She has taught children’s art, owned and run a restaurant, a catering business and a cooking school. She has owned and created two Inns. The Inn of the Victorian Bird in Santa Fe and Annie’s Place in Todos Santos. She is a licensed hypnotherapist, realtor, wife, mother, grandmother and poet. She has been writing since she was nine years old.
After many years in the east she moved to Santa Fe with her first husband, a painter, and eventually, in 1994, landed in Todos Santos, Mexico on the Baja peninsula. There she started a writing group and initiated monthly open readings. She lived in Todos Santos for fourteen years.
In 2004 Annie attended the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont.
Her poems have been published in Rattle, The Connecticut Review, and several other journals. Most recently her work can be seen in the bi-lingual literary journal La Presa.
She now lives in Guanajuato, Mexico and is working on two books of poetry to come out next year. She is involved with the Embajadores Press and is one of the five writers who founded the press. She participates in open readings regularly.
Embajadoras Press just published Fragments of Loss, by Annie Smith
Contact Annie Smith by e-mail
Two Samples of Annie Smith’s Poetry:
She closes up after the party
the soon to be widow
closed up the house by herself
thinking of all the parties
they had closed up together
it was a strange feeling
after so many people
sharing her space
to find herself
alone in the room
air still ringing
with laughter and forks
the house still aroused
and in long table mode
there’s a certain excitement
in being so close to the spot
where death will close in
what a joke she thinks
death is closing on everyone
all of the time
death though had staked
an immediate claim
here in her home and
as she held her martini
she saw how determined she was
that life should go on
in the face of this oh
so personal
process of dying
Giving Away Cookbooks
For Scotty
When you have cooked together with someone
using the same cookbooks over and over
it seems possible love might remain
in the topography of tomato bits,
the dampness of oil, a fleck of rosemary
caught near the binding.
Open one cookbook.
You might find in your mind, counters:
wooden
marble
granite
concrete
a rose in a marmalade jar
green tea mornings,
china town teapots
revisitable realities
soaked in loss
steeped in sensual memory,
old kitchens, longings
belongings and tastings.
How can you possibly choose which to let go?
You have already lost so much,
all that tightly wound energy,
the excitement that was him
before that terrible December
and then wasn’t.
Now this,
this sorting and
you do it.
Out of 90 cookbooks
you part with 60.
two thirds of your lives cooking together.
You choose to keep:
Bruce Adel’s pork book,
Indian, Asian, Diane Kennedy’s
latest and last , Mediterrannean,
Spanish,Portuguese.
You choose not to keep:
books about pate with pictures,
Joy of Cooking,
anything French
Done
you sit silent
sensing your fingernails growing.
You feel them in fact, brazen things,
growing as though nothing at all
had happened here..